


A Word for Everything

by spectreshepard



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-29 02:29:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8472085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spectreshepard/pseuds/spectreshepard
Summary: A collection of responses to one-word prompts. This takes a look at the events of Mass Effect through Shepard's eyes, looking from the outside in at the fishbowl world that he no longer seems a part of. From fleeting moments to over-arching epics that leave their mark on Shepard, this is a reflection upon the complex nature of humanity in dire straits.
After all, there is a word for everything.
[tags updated as chapters update!]





	1. Sonder

> 1 _. **Sonder** : The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own._

* * *

 

Apollo’s has never been a quiet refuge, least of all when the Citadel lies in smoke and ashes. Shepard shifts uncomfortably in his seat, looking over the Presidium with absent interest. It took _three_ years for half of these people to realise what was coming, and a Cerberus coup for the other half to do anything about it.

Maybe it was selfish, maybe it was unfair. Maybe Shepard was now too far gone wearing some fucked-up crown that painted him as an icon, a _hero_ , to contribute any sort of idea towards what ‘the people’ should do.

Clearing his throat, he sips gingerly on the bland coffee in front of him, the steam rising in a poor show of authenticity. The taste is the same as the colour, and it does nothing to wash away the exhaustion sitting in every heavy bone. He breathes out sharply as he places the mug back down, the clink of metal on metal ringing up his hand and straight to his ear until he shakes it off.

Maybe it was his own prerogative that was diminishing by the hour, by the minute, by every second his thoughts are consumed with that dire red hum. It’s immovable, impossible to ignore, woven deep inside synthetic muscle and every shred of humanity that Project Lazarus had left him with. For a while, it was all he cared about. It was all he _could_ care about. Why weren’t these people even trying to understand, _comprehend,_ the scale of this? Sure, last time it was Sovereign and he ended up in pieces across the station, but that wouldn’t be happening this time. Hell, they’d be lucky to even see the aftermath of this one.

But Shepard failed to see the smaller picture, the quiet intricacies of family and friendship that had no place on a warship. That’s what he told himself on the SR1. That’s what he tried to tell himself when Cerberus found him. It’s what he tries to deflect his inadequacy with now.

Somehow, it doesn’t work.

The smell of burning debris is the furthest thing from Shepard’s mind as their attention is caught by a small family, hurrying through the amassed crowd on the market plaza. The sounds of a rising conflict soon follow, snippets of grim statements and resentful rebounds making their way to Shepard, who sits back, now entirely focused on the trio. A family. Two humans, two men, hands clasped firmly behind a small child who stumbled more often than they managed solid steps. The men are clearly arguing, but it seems so trivial, so lost in the din of the crowd and the threat that lingers outside Citadel space.

 “Hell no, you’re not going.” one says, stopping abruptly.

“People out there are dying, _good_ people- I could at least help!” the other tugs on the first man’s hand gently, pleading.

The rest of the conversation diminishes into the crowd, and Shepard doesn’t see or hear them again. But he’s left wondering how complex life must seem outside of war.

Shepard’s used to rules and regulations, never without a strict margin of freedom. Free reign to live as he chooses outside of the Alliance and Spectre duties doesn’t arise often, and least of all in the middle of a war. In the middle of _this_ war. And war never changes. It's a brutal construct of picking sides and no-man's land, where being in the wrong place at the wrong time just gets you killed. The cold logic of such a dogfight relies on the certainty that _something_ has to give, whether it be for better or worse. And either way, people lose. People always lose.

But it's not a soldier's job to care. It's a soldier's job to fight.

Battle strategies, ground tactics, coordinating simultaneous strikes on a Reaper - Shepard knows how to do that. Sure. It’s part of the job. It's not so much the nine-to-five of the Citadel Wards, so much as it is the twelve hours of uncertainty in no-man's land and wondering whether you'd ever get back to your bed again. After a while, the sounds of gunfire and Reapers becomes the expected accompanying tones, the prelude to a few more unmarked graves. Still, Shepard can't imagine how to deal with the precarious affairs of the mind and heart that exist within the realities of day-to-day life. Not because that life is unremarkable - far from it - but simply because it's not _his world_.

 He would be lucky to call it such.

 But at the end of it all, the callous simplicity of war never fails to disillusion him - not after having witnessed such a _human_ exchange. And that makes him wonder.

 Shepard knows he can paint a battlefield bloody and have it called a masterpiece by militaristic ideals, but in some strange phenomenon, humanity continues to run on the basis of intricate little ideas that manifest into lives far more complex than Shepard’s own.

 Simplicity has a way of making itself known, in uncomfortable white noise where Shepard's thoughts should be. So he stands up and leaves, disappearing into the crowds, homeward bound for a home he doesn’t have.

 


	2. Opia

 

> 2 _. **Opia** : the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable._

* * *

 

“Torfan.” Javik hisses, eyes opening slowly as he reels back from Shepard, relinquishing his hold on the Commander. Shepard doesn’t move, boots set heavy on the ground and eyes fixed on the Prothean without a shadow of sympathy for what he assumes Javik just witnessed.

“I misjudged you in the beginning, did I not?” Javik presses, eyes narrowing as his curiosity remains unsated. Shepard can see the remnants of Javik’s world now almost burned into his eyelids, the harsh lines of Reaper destruction; systematic and unrelenting. It’s so perfectly architectured, that when Shepard finally sees past Javik, the lines fit the shape of his own world in front of him with clinically engineered symmetry.

It’s bitterly cold, the shiver up his spine runs right through him and into his ribcage, peeling away the freshly painted veneer of heroism on his battle-hardened heart. He recognises the fear sitting pretty in his chest, the last remnant of Alchera’s ice, of everything he thought he’d left behind. Shepard remains silent, jaw clenching as his teeth grind together, to stop the fear spilling out.

It takes everything he has not to look Javik in the eye, to look straight ahead, to do as he was always told to do. To _ignore_ , entirely and completely. Yet, he knows Javik is looking straight through him. He knows Javik can see every stuttering heartbeat, every twitch of muscle, every thought, every impulse, every feeling Shepard knows how to feel. There is no hiding, no subtle shift of his position to assume the higher moral ground, no cocky smile and backhanded words to follow. Just the emergence of a deep, dark chasm between them that threatens to tear their fraying trust.

So Shepard pulls the thread.

“Was I wrong?” he asks, quietly. _Quietly_. His voice is barely a murmur over the fading hum of Javik’s sensory translation, but Javik shifts uncomfortably, unable to read further between the ever-expanding lines of the Commander’s history.

Javik had come to understand the language of these... somewhat evolved species, but the matters of their mind continued to elude him. The commander knew his worth; that much he’d proven to him, so why is he afraid? Javik can smell the uncertainty shrouding Shepard’s worn armor, plates made heavier with each life-laden doubt. The longer he leaves Shepard’s question in the air, the more the metallic tinge of fear permeates his senses, so Javik deigns to give an answer.

“No.” Javik replies, but Shepard doesn’t need the abilities of a lost empire to see Javik’s faltering conviction. The Prothean blinks slowly, contemplating.

“Javik. I need you to listen to me, _carefully_. Those people you saw, those men and women-- you know how they ended up like that?” Shepard has the question in his own hands now, and it’s his turn to push, even as he stumbles over his words in a rush to justify his doubt.

“Under _my command_. Just like you are now. Like Liara. Ashley. Garrus. The whole damn crew. So, tell me again, Javik,” Shepard’s chains seem to drop in an instant, and he steps forward with purpose, a careless ember from a dying fire that Javik was unwilling to spark.

“Was I wrong?”

Javik doesn’t grace Shepard with an answer. Silence stretches on again like an old and unwelcome friend, hanging around their necks in a nonchalant noose. Javik momentarily forces the hand, and forces Shepard’s gaze on him so he can finally _read_. The cybernetic glare is haunting, red slicing easily through the Commander’s own hazel irises with lethal precision. Everything about him is made to be dangerous, but here and now, nothing about him betrays any kind of danger.

Except that unmissable, _unforgivable_ heart upon his sleeve.

Javik understands the need for survival at any cost, better than anyone alive. Of that, he can be certain. And so he understands the bottom line of the Commander’s ability to survive; nobody will take the only thing left from a man who has lost everything else.

Nobody will deal the killing blow to a man who bears his own heart outside his suit of armor, because there is nothing more dangerous than a soldier who has nothing left to lose.

So Javik smiles. It’s grim and deadly, and not made for reassuring, but makes a familiar sight for soldiers like Shepard. He hopes it is enough.

“I think you already have your own answer, Commander.”


	3. Anecdoche

 

 

> 3 _. **Anecdoche** : A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening_

* * *

Shepard flicks the credit chit on the table. It spins on its bottom-most corner for a moment, before it starts to fall. His finger twitches, a rush of air and blue surrounds the chit, now caught in suspension. Shepard moves his index finger slowly, turning the chit nonchalantly.  
  
There was no purpose, no necessity behind the motion, and Shepard liked that. To do something without need, simply on a whim. He had almost forgotten the taste of freedom, like the electric hum at the back of his throat.  
  
The chit slows as Shepard manipulates the space around it again, but his eyes are elsewhere this time. Steaming mugs of coffee and cocoa and strange concoctions for Garrus litter the table, but Shepard's interest drifts through the haze to find the words being passed across the way. He keeps his hand turning lightly, and the index finger of his free hand taps the metal surface of the table. A rhythmic drumming persists, to mimic the way Shepard sees his friends speak.  
  
It helps him.  
  
Well, it used to. Shepard had adapted to life without sound, ever since the eezo exposure nailed him with his biotics. The drawbacks? Some slightly fried sensorineural nerves. Project Lazarus had brought him back, good as... well. Good as new. Hearing included. Still, it's hard to leave behind old habits, and Shepard is reluctant to part with such sentimentality.  
  
Liara is speaking in rapid time somewhere to the right of Shepard, and he vaguely places Javik nearby the stream of data coming from Liara, if his uninterested grunts and murmurs were anything to go by. Honestly, Javik seemed mostly disgruntled by the fact he was sharing a table with primitives than by anything Liara was telling him. Tali is sprawled across two chairs next to the prothean, legs curled up on one while she sits on the other. For such a tiny thing, she could take up space when she wanted to. Shepard hides a smile as he moves past her, finding Ashley sitting straight across from him. Shepard pieces together snippets of conversation between the two, and his interest is piqued when he figures that Tali is asking about Ash's family. Makes sense. Tali only really ever had her father and Raan. It was certainly a... different perspective.  
  
His thoughts derail when he notices Ash gives him a subtle glance over her datapad, and he smiles quickly, ears burning. Perhaps he needed to get out of the habit of listening. Truth be told, he'd be lucky if his job ever _let_ him.  
  
"--so, I told that C-Sec officer where he could shove his 'mutually beneficial' tax credit scheme--" Garrus' rant suddenly pitches in volume down the table, with air quotations to boot. Sparing a glance to see the other half of Garrus' conversation, Shepard finds Steve's best effort at maintaining interest in a heavily one-sided tax debate. Shepard snorts, diverting his gaze back across the table to James, sat next to Garrus. The lieutenant shoots Shepard a withering look. Shepard only grins and leaves him to his fate, slap-bang in the middle of Garrus' storytelling trajectory.  
  
_"--spatial mapping of pre-planned flight vectors--"_  
  
It's not too difficult to recognize the static voice over the comm. EDI, it turned out, was particularly good at... debating. Perhaps that's why Shepard finds Joker taking a rare break from the bridge to join the crew, sitting at the end of the table with a mug firmly in hand. A tiny, useless shield from the barrage of statistically accurate data EDI pulls from nothing. Shepard smirks. _Arguing_. EDI was very good at arguing.  
  
Nobody pays heed to the spinning credit chit on the table at all, and Shepard feels an inward sense of tranquility. He would keep spinning his own little world, and nobody would notice. He would scream, shout, cry bloody murder, and nobody would hear. He would let himself be _human_ , and nobody would blame him at all.  
  
Like a wave on a barren shore, Shepard lets the thought consume him for a while.  
  
Calloused hands curl into fists on the table, the chit stops spinning and falls to the metal surface with a dull clink, but still, it turns no heads. Shepard fidgets in his seat, trying to shift the static in the air around him as his hands slowly stop tingling, the blue sensation fading.  
  
It had been a long while since any of them got the chance to simply sit down and talk. Not about the war, not about their newly-formed alliances, not about their rapidly dwindling hope of making it out alive. Just... _talk_. About the shitty food rations, or space coffee that isn't coffee, hell, even taking digs at somebody's shitty playlist choices. Anything at all. Anything that meant they didn't have to listen.  
  
Listening was hard, at the best of times. Harder still when it meant finding a meaning for other people, as well as your own. A leader made a living out of a skill like that, and Shepard knew it.  
  
Trying to listen to one man in the middle of a war? Shepard knows how to take orders.  
  
Trying to listen to thousands of people, every one of them with something to lose in that war? Shepard doesn't know where to begin.  
  
Sometimes, Shepard simply doesn't listen at all. He spins his own little world, and it keeps on going because it must. It keeps on going, because the minute he stops is the minute it goes silent.  
  
And up here, in space? Up here, between the stars? Up here, in the black where light can't reach? Silence is your faithful, unwanted companion to an inevitable end.


End file.
